African girls, nineteenth‐century mission education and the patriarchal imperative

Abstract

This paper draws on Anglican mission archive material to uncover the extent to which girls’ schooling in early nineteenth‐century West Africa developed as a response to male interests and perceived male needs. The founding of the colony of Sierra Leone in 1787 as a home for freed slaves followed by the arrival of Protestant missionaries in 1804 offers a laboratory type environment to trace the development of girls’ formal schooling in Africa. In particular, the missionaries understood the importance of educating women if Christianity was to prosper on the continent. Girls were to be educated to take their place in the new Christian monogamous family, to provide moral and practical support for men, and to bring up their children in the new faith. They were to be taught separately from boys where possible, by female teachers and with a differentiated curriculum dominated by sewing. Educational opportunities were expanded only insofar as women needed to provide fitting and accomplished marriage companions for educated men seeking to advance their careers in the new meritocratic society.

Keywords:

• missions
• education
• girls
• Africa
• history
• patriarchy

Notes

1. The other two major British Protestant societies active in Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century were the Wesleyan (Methodist) Missionary Society (MMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS). The CMS was the first British mission society to allow single women to serve as overseas missionaries (as early as 1820), whereas the Wesleyans sent their first single woman to Belizes in 1859 and the LMS to Southern Africa in 1863.

2. As the CMS initially failed to find volunteers for missionary work in Africa among the English population, it relied on German Lutheran recruits for the first 12 years of its engagement with the continent. A number of these men brought out English wives, who took on the responsibility of teaching girls, and by the middle of the century English men and women had become the majority in the CMS mission in Sierra Leone. In relation to the early years of missionary activity, however, it would be misleading to characterise opinions and attitudes about girls’ schooling as exclusively ‘English’ or ‘British’. This chapter shifts at times between ‘English/British’ and ‘European’.

3. The largest providers were the National Society (for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church), founded in 1811, and the British and Foreign Schools Society, founded in 1808 (under a different name). The Ladies Committees had oversight of the girls’ schools run by the Societies.

4. Renamed the Annie Walsh Memorial School in 1877, this school still exists in Freetown as an elite government school.

5. Julia Sass was to remain at her post for 21 years, an astonishing achievement for the period. Her record was only surpassed in West Africa by Elizabeth Waldron, who ran the girls’ Wesleyan primary school in Cape Coast, Ghana from 1837 to 1880 (a total of 43 years). She was, however, born and raised in Cape Coast of mixed parentage.

6. All the documents in the CMS archives at Birmingham University relating to Sierra Leone begin with the reference CA1, followed by letters relating to specific sets of papers, e.g. E (early correspondence), M (mission book), O (original papers), and a document number.

7. Even earlier records exist: for example, the school set up at Christiansborg Castle in 1722 in what is now Ghana at first only took in boys but later ‘girls were accepted and instructed in the domestic arts’ (Wise 1956, 2).

8. A timetable of 1852 (CA1/O 173d) shows that the boys in the first and second classes were taught Greek and Algebra, Grecian history, music, English grammar, Geography and Globes, history, arithmetic, Latin and English composition, as well as reading, writing and the scriptures. The timetable of the girls’ school shows that, in addition to their needlework activities they were only taught reading, scriptures, Globes, mental arithmetic, grammar and geography (although an earlier curriculum of 1850 also included history, music, drawing ‘and French as an extra’ (CA1/O 10C)).